“The Yellow Wallpaper”by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Notes

Setting: Victorian EraLate 1880’s

• A woman’s role = wife and mother

• Women could not vote or own property

• Women were to be “pure, pious, domestic and submissive.”

Queen Victoria 1819 - 1901

Victorian Era

• The Feminist movement had just begun as a radical, fringe ideology, largely dismissed by the mainstream.

• Women could not live on their own; their husbands or fathers served as their guardians

Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Not a ‘typical’ Victorian lady

• Gilman believed in women’s rights• Her own experiences were

similar to those of the YWP narrator

• Gilman believed that women must exercise their intellect or go mad

• The story, YWP, was set in the Victorian era, and the story’s theme was contrary to the established beliefs of the period.

Is the narrator of YWP physically or mentally ill?

• The narrator has recently given birth; she may be suffering from post-partum depression

• The narrator mentions that she has been diagnosed with “A slight hysterical tendency,” and was being treated as most women of her time would be: with the Rest Cure.

The Rest Cure

• This cure was advocated strongly by nationally recognized neurologist of the time, Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell.

• His Rest Cure called for complete rest, coerced feeding and isolation.

Hysteria

• In the Victorian era, women were discouraged from work and over-stimulation

• Hysteria’s nature was questionable, and many believed women faked illness to gain attention.

Hysteria

• The Rest Cure was both a treatment and a punishment.

• Most women disliked being placed on rest, and were unlikely to become “hysterical” again.

Analysis & Quotes

Important Themes & Ideas

Patriarchy & the belittling of women in marriage (note how John patronizes her)

Childlike dependency of women Superiority of physiciansNeed for work and expression of creativity

Important Themes & Ideas

Need for intellectual stimulation Unreliable narrator Style of prose narration becomes

breathless, manic Does the narrator go insane or does she maintain her sanity by interacting with the only stimulus she has—the wallpaper?

Observations about the House

• haunted house…that would be asking too much of fate!

• And why have stood so long untenanted?

• It is quite alone • there is something strange about the

house—I can feel it.

Alone…isolated…haunted…symbols for---her? Women?

The House…

What kind of place is this? – There were greenhouses too, but they are

all broken now.– there are hedges and walls and gates

that lock– An old mental hospital? (Greenhouses were often

used as therapy for the insane)

Work vs Rest• “Personally, I believe that congenial work, with

excitement and change, would do me good.” • “sometimes fancy that in my condition if I had

less opposition and more society and stimulus” – Clearly, the narrator understands that she needs

activity, rather than isolation and “rest”

“The Nursery”• “The paint and paper look as if

a boys' school had used it.” • “…heavy bedstead, and then

the barred windows, and then that”

• “I never saw such ravages as the children have made here.” What kind of nursery has barred

windows? Could the “rings and things” be restraining mechanisms for mental patients?

The Wallpaper

It is stripped off—the paper—in great patches all around the head of my bed, about as far as I can reach, and in a great place on the other side of the room low down.

I never saw a worse paper in my life.

The Wallpaper

sprawling flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin.

The color is repellent, almost revolting; a smouldering unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight.

It is a dull yet lurid orange in some places, a sickly sulphur tint in others.

The Wallpaper

• This paper looks to me as if it knew what a vicious influence it had!

• There is a recurrent spot where the pattern lolls like a broken neck and two bulbous eyes stare at you upside down.

• I never saw so much expression in an inanimate thing before, and we all know how much expression they have!

The Wallpaper

• Clearly, some other unhappy person (or people) have been held in this room, tearing at the paper, gouging the walls, gnawing on the bed…

The wallpaper occupies her mind

• I'm getting really fond of the room in spite of the wallpaper. Perhaps because of the wallpaper.

• It dwells in my mind so!

• You think you have mastered it, but just as you get well underway in following, it turns a back-somersault and there you are. It slaps you in the face, knocks you down, and tramples upon you.

The wallpaper occupies her mind

• It sticks horribly and the pattern just enjoys it! All those strangled heads and bulbous eyes and waddling fungus growths just shriek with derision! –The wallpaper has come alive and

interactive! In fact, it is like another character.

Lunacy…• She stays up at night and

sleeps during the day.• The word "lunatic" is built

on the Latin word for moon, luna.

• Lunacy = a form of insanity characterized by alternating lucid and insane periods, believed to be influenced by phases of the moon.

• Cycles of the moon… menstrual cycles…more hysterical woman stuff?

Sensory Stimulation• It is the strangest yellow,

that wall-paper! It makes me think of all the yellow things I ever saw—not beautiful ones like buttercups, but old foul, bad yellow things.

• But there is something else about that paper— the smell!

• A yellow smell.

Sensory Stimulation

• The narrator begins to hear, touch, and smell the paper as it comes more alive to her.

Who is the woman in the wallpaper?

• Like the narrator herself, the woman is trapped within a suffocating domestic “pattern” from which no escape is possible…however, she tears off the paper to free the woman (and herself)

Resolution: Victim or Victor?

• “Now why should that man have fainted? But he did, and right across my path by the wall, so that I had to creep over him every time!” – The meaning of this ending has been the subject of a great deal of critical debate.

– Some critics see this as a point where the narrator triumphs over her husband and the wallpaper.

– Others see this as a point where the narrator fails since she has finally been driven insane by the paper and not escaped the room.

What do you think?

Charlotte Perkins Gilman: The end

• Gilman's major concern during her lifetime was feminism-- women's suffrage as well as women's economic independence.

• Gilman learned in 1932 that she had incurable breast cancer.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman: The end

• As an advocate for the right-to-die, Gilman committed suicide on by covering her face with a rag soaked in chloroform on August 17, 1935.

• She "chose chloroform over cancer" as her autobiography and suicide note stated.